… and while my fingers run through the strings, I barely breathe…

Sembrowser 0.2

Several weeks are passed from the 0.1 version, so it was time to release the new version; before getting into a few details, let me remind you that this is not a substitute for Dolphin, but simply a prototype for checking the capabilities of having a faceted browsing in a file manager; thus, it has not all the functionalities of Dolphin itself, but only those that I think are needed in a very simple manager.

Now, the new features:

new queries under the hood: this should speed up the tags loading (and the file refreshing, too)

resizability: the facets panel was quite blocked in the first release, now it can be resized along all directions

configuration of the facets to be shown: a settings page can be used for choosing which of the three possible facets (document type, time, tags) are shown in the panel; this may be useful especially on smaller screen (those scroll bars are not the best thing to use, I have to admit it)

added some file manager functionalities, in particular cut-copy-paste

some minor improvements here and there…

So, go to the KDE-Apps page and check it out, and then tell me what’s good and bad with it (only constructive comments, please, no rants!).

P.S.: you can also get the source from Gitorious, or install it on Ubuntu (Karmic for now, Lucid in the weekend) from my PPA.

They have both been considered a few month ago, but for now they have both been dropped, essentially because in a faceted browsing system (cfr. online ones) I didn’t want to have three completely different widgets.
There was a calendar for the “when” facet in 0.1, which could be used as an alternative to the buttons widget, but I have dropped it for now because it caused problems with resizing; maybe I will reintroduce it (only as an “advanced” option) if I will be able to solve those problems.

Don’t know nothing about UI designs but what about sliders to pick the values? And what about something telling the user what he is searching for, a phrase like “searching documents created yesterday til now with tag ‘important'”.